Immortal Paladin

The first winter I remembered in Chicago felt meaner than anything God should’ve allowed onto the earth. The wind didn’t blow so much as cut. It slipped through coat sleeves, crawled beneath collars, and bit at the skin until bones themselves seemed frozen solid. Momma and I had arrived in the city with two suitcases, a Bible wrapped in cloth, and enough money to survive maybe three weeks if we stretched every nickel hard enough. She told me Chicago was supposed to be better than Mississippi. Said a man could become something here. Said a colored woman could earn honest wages without lowering her eyes every second of the day.

The city lied to her plenty.

Still, she kept believing in it.

We rented a cramped apartment on the South Side where the radiator screamed louder than church women during Sunday revival. Paint peeled from the walls in long curls, and roaches scattered whenever the lights flicked on, but Momma treated the place like a mansion. Every morning before dawn, she heated water on the stove so I could wash properly before school. She ironed my clothes careful as a tailor, even after working double shifts cleaning hotel rooms downtown where white businessmen walked past her like she was furniture.

“You stand tall out there, Wendell,” she always told me while fixing my collar. “This city already wants you bent.”

I was seven when I first understood what she meant.

A white boy around my age spat at my shoes outside a grocery store because I reached for the door before his mother did. The woman looked at me like I was some stray dog tracking mud onto her porch. She grabbed her son’s shoulder and said, loud enough for everybody nearby to hear, “That’s what happens when they start moving up here.”

They.

I heard that word my whole childhood.

At school, teachers smiled thin smiles whenever black children answered too smart. Cops lingered around our blocks like wolves pacing fences. Landlords charged us more for apartments barely fit for rats. Momma used to say Chicago wasn’t the South wearing a different coat. It was the same beast pretending to smile.

But our neighborhood fought hard to stay alive anyway.

On summer evenings, music spilled from open windows while folks played cards on stoops and argued baseball loud enough for the whole block to hear. Old men smoked cigarettes beneath streetlamps and warned boys like me about ending up dead or locked away. Women braided hair on porches while keeping one eye on every child in sight. We were poor, but poor people learned to carry one another because nobody else would.

The neighborhood toughened me fast.

By ten, I knew how to run when police sirens sounded too close. By eleven, I knew which alleys belonged to which boys and which streets turned dangerous after dark. By twelve, I’d already seen blood on concrete enough times that it stopped shocking me. Fights happened over money, disrespect, women, territory, pride, and sometimes over nothing at all. A weak boy didn’t last long where I grew up. Kindness had to wear brass knuckles just to survive.

Momma hated that hardness growing inside me.

“You ain’t an animal,” she told me one night after I came home bruised from fighting two older boys. “Don’t let this place convince you that hurting people is the only way to stand.”

I nodded because she wanted me to, but deep down I already understood something she didn’t. Men listened when they feared you. Fear kept food in your pockets and danger at arm’s length. The world respected violence quicker than goodness.

Then I became a teenager, and life sharpened its teeth.

Momma’s back started hurting from work around the time I turned fifteen. She scrubbed floors at a meatpacking facility by then, twelve hours a day breathing chemicals strong enough to sting the eyes. Some nights she came home limping so badly I had to help her sit down. She still smiled through it. Still asked about school. Still made dinner like exhaustion couldn’t touch her.

One rainy evening, two men knocked on our apartment door while I was finishing homework.

I knew before they spoke.

Their hats stayed low in their hands. Their eyes wouldn’t meet mine.

There’d been an accident at the factory. Faulty machinery. Crushed ribs. Internal bleeding.

They said she died quickly.

I remember staring at their mouths without understanding the words. The room suddenly felt hollow, like the walls themselves had emptied out. My chest tightened until breathing hurt. Momma couldn’t die. She was the strongest person I knew. She survived Mississippi. Survived hunger. Survived white men screaming insults in her face. Survived Chicago winters and endless labor and loneliness.

But a machine killed her anyway.

The funeral nearly buried me alongside her.

Afterward, people from church brought casseroles and condolences for maybe two weeks before life moved on. Bills didn’t. Rent didn’t. Hunger sure as hell didn’t. I was sixteen with no family nearby and no steady work. School stopped mattering once eviction notices started appearing beneath our door.

So I did what boys around me always ended up doing.

I stole.

At first it was small things. Cigarettes. Wallets. Watches lifted off drunk men stumbling through alleys. Then came boosting car radios, running packages for older gangsters, helping break into warehouses after midnight. Juvenile courts treated black boys rough, but being under eighteen still saved me more than once. Cops beat me bloody, judges threatened reform school, but I always slipped back onto the streets somehow.

Every time I looked in a mirror, I saw Momma’s disappointment staring back.

Then came the night everything changed.

I was eighteen by then, though barely. Snow covered the sidewalks dirty gray beneath flickering streetlights. I’d agreed to meet a man near an abandoned building to sell stolen jewelry. Instead, he tried robbing me. White man, maybe thirty years old, smelling like whiskey and sweat. He pulled a knife first. I still remembered the way moonlight flashed against the blade.

Fear took over after that.

We struggled against a brick wall while snow crunched beneath our shoes. He slashed my arm. I grabbed a rusted pipe lying nearby and swung hard without thinking.

Once.

That was all.

The sound stayed with me forever.

He collapsed instantly. Blood spread across the snow black as oil beneath the weak alley light. I remember standing there unable to move, my breath fogging wildly while panic swallowed every thought in my head. I kept waiting for him to stand back up.

He never did.

I hid the body because terror outweighed grief. In 1950s and 60s Chicago, a dead white man beside a black teenager meant one thing: they’d bury me beneath the prison. Or worse.

But hiding him didn’t bury the memory.

For months afterward, I woke drenched in sweat hearing that pipe strike bone again and again inside my skull. I stopped sleeping proper. Stopped eating much. Every siren sounded like judgment coming for me. I’d sit alone in my apartment whispering apologies to Momma like somehow she could still hear me.

You didn’t raise a murderer.

But I’d killed a man all the same.

The thing about guilt was that it hollowed you out slow. People thought fear came suddenly like lightning, but real fear lingered. It sat beside you while eating. Followed you through crowds. Waited quietly at the foot of your bed every night.

I started wandering eventually. Didn’t matter where. Anywhere but that apartment.

That was how I found the church.

The building itself wasn’t special. Small Baptist church squeezed between two aging storefronts. Peeling paint. Crooked sign. But music poured through its doors warm enough to stop me in my tracks. People inside sang like broken souls trying to lift themselves toward heaven one note at a time.

I sat in the back during service hoping nobody noticed me.

Pastor Williams noticed anyway.

He was a broad man with tired eyes and a voice smoother than river water. After service, he sat beside me without asking questions right away. Didn’t judge my clothes. Didn’t lecture me about sin. Just talked.

“You look heavy,” he finally said.

That nearly broke me apart.

Nobody had asked how I was in years.

I started attending every Sunday after that. Then Wednesdays too. I helped distribute food during charity drives. Helped repair homes for elderly folks around the neighborhood. Helped escort children safely through dangerous streets after school. For the first time since Momma died, I felt useful for something besides hurting people.

Faith didn’t erase what I’d done.

But it taught me a man could still crawl toward light even after drowning in darkness.

Then Vietnam came.

By then I’d crossed into adulthood fully. Newspapers carried stories about communists, patriotism, and war spreading overseas. Young men lined recruitment offices either chasing purpose or running from something waiting behind them at home.

I think I was doing both.

Part of me believed maybe war could punish me properly for my sins. Another part hoped serving honorably might finally make Momma proud again somewhere beyond the clouds.

So I enlisted.

Vietnam destroyed every foolish idea I ever carried about glory.

The jungle itself felt alive in the worst possible way. Heat wrapped around us suffocating thick while insects screamed endlessly from the trees. You never saw the enemy clearly. Death came through rustling leaves, hidden traps, or sudden gunfire ripping men apart mid-sentence.

The first soldier I watched die was nineteen years old.

Private Ellis from Detroit.

One moment he complained about missing his girl back home. The next moment half his throat disappeared in a spray of blood. He dropped clutching at himself while making sounds no human being should ever make. We couldn’t even reach him immediately because bullets tore through branches around us from unseen rifles.

War turned men into frightened animals fast.

Napalm lit entire sections of jungle orange at night while villages burned in the distance. Children cried beside corpses. Soldiers smoked cigarettes beside bodies because eventually death became too common to honor properly. Some men cracked jokes after firefights because laughter was easier than screaming.

I saw good men shoot civilians out of panic. Saw boys barely old enough to shave bleed out begging for mothers thousands of miles away. Saw corpses bloated beneath the sun until they barely resembled people anymore.

And every night, when the jungle quieted for a few precious hours, I remembered the man I killed back in Chicago.

Funny thing was, Vietnam didn’t make me feel more monstrous.

It made me realize the world had always been monstrous long before me.

When I returned home from Vietnam, Chicago looked smaller somehow.

The buildings still leaned tired against one another on the South Side. The streets still smelled like smoke, rainwater, gasoline, and old hardship. Children still ran through alleys laughing too loudly because poor neighborhoods learned early how to wring joy from misery. Men still gathered outside corner stores discussing politics, boxing, and bills they couldn’t afford. Everything looked familiar.

But I wasn’t familiar anymore.

War hollowed men out in ways civilians couldn’t see.

People expected soldiers to come home either heroes or monsters. They didn’t understand most of us returned as ghosts somewhere trapped in between. We stepped off planes carrying pieces of jungle inside us that never really left. Some men brought back missing limbs. Others brought bottles. Others brought silence so deep it swallowed whole marriages.

America blamed us for that war.

That was the bitterest part.

We got sent overseas as boys barely old enough to drink, ordered into hell by men sitting comfortably behind desks, then returned home hated for surviving it. Protesters spat near us. Newspapers called us baby killers. Some folks looked away entirely like we carried disease. White soldiers suffered. Black soldiers suffered worse. We’d fought for a country that still treated us like second-class citizens, then got condemned for fighting at all.

Faith saved me again.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

But enough.

I started attending church regularly once more after returning home. Pastor Williams had grown older by then, more gray in his beard, but his eyes still carried that same tired warmth. He recognized immediately what Vietnam had done to me. Didn’t need to ask.

“You left carrying guilt,” he told me one evening while we stacked canned goods after a food drive. “Now you carrying ghosts too.”

I laughed at that, though it came out sounding broken.

The church took in veterans whenever it could. Some came seeking God. Others just wanted somewhere quiet to sit where nobody screamed at them about politics. We organized support groups before anybody called them that. Shared meals. Shared stories. Shared silence too, because sometimes silence said more than words ever could.

But faith couldn’t save everybody.

I watched men lose themselves slowly after the war.

One veteran named Carter used to sit beside me during Wednesday services. Soft-spoken man from Georgia with trembling hands and haunted eyes. He couldn’t sleep without drinking himself unconscious first. One winter morning they found him dead inside his apartment with a pistol beside his bed and gospel music still playing on the radio.

Another man disappeared into heroin entirely. Another beat his wife bloody during nightmares he mistook for ambushes. Another walked into Lake Michigan carrying rocks in his pockets.

I tried helping them.

Lord knew I tried.

But broken people couldn’t always hold together other broken people. Sometimes we just cut our hands grabbing at each other’s shattered pieces.

And I was shattered too.

The nightmares never stopped.

Even decades later, Vietnam waited for me behind closed eyes.

Some nights I woke convinced the ceiling fan was helicopter blades chopping through humid jungle air. Other nights I smelled burning flesh so vividly I stumbled to the bathroom vomiting before realizing I was home. Fireworks sent my pulse racing. Sudden noises made my muscles tense instinctively toward violence before my mind caught up.

Worst of all were the faces.

The dead never stayed buried properly in memory.

Private Ellis clutching his ruined throat. Villagers screaming while flames consumed huts. Young soldiers crying for mothers who would never hear them again. Sometimes I saw the white man from Chicago too, lying motionless in snow beneath dim alley light. Death followed me faithfully through every chapter of life.

Then came Gloria.

God must’ve sent her because I sure didn’t deserve her.

I met her during a church fundraiser sometime in the seventies. She laughed easily, the kind of laugh that filled entire rooms warm as sunlight through stained glass. She worked as a schoolteacher and carried herself with a patience I couldn’t understand. Most people saw my silence and backed away eventually. Gloria stayed.

“You always look like you listening to something far away,” she once told me while we walked home after evening service.

“Maybe I am,” I answered.

She squeezed my hand gently. “Then come back.”

Nobody had ever spoken to me like that before.

We married two years later.

Then came our daughter, Naomi.

Holding her for the first time terrified me more than war ever had. She was tiny. Fragile. Perfect. I remember staring at her sleeping face wondering how a world this cruel allowed something so innocent to exist inside it. I swore right there I’d never let darkness touch her if I could help it.

Life finally softened after that.

Not entirely. Trauma didn’t vanish because happiness arrived. But happiness gave pain something to stand beside instead of swallowing everything whole. Gloria and Naomi filled our home with warmth I thought I’d lost forever. Sunday dinners. School recitals. Family photographs. Laughter drifting through hallways late at night.

And when nightmares came, they held me through them.

Sometimes I woke screaming.

Sometimes thrashing.

Sometimes drenched in sweat while grabbing desperately for weapons that weren’t there.

Gloria never flinched.

She’d pull me against her chest while whispering prayers softly into the dark. Naomi used to toddle sleepily into our room after hearing the commotion and crawl beside us beneath blankets. Those two women anchored me to humanity more times than they ever knew.

Thank God they did.

Because despite everything, I lived a good life.

I truly did.

I found redemption, purpose, and love.

But good things were never forever.

The home invasion happened on a rainy Thursday night.

I remembered the sound of glass shattering downstairs.

Years disappeared from me instantly.

One moment I was middle-aged Wendell sitting half-asleep in a recliner. The next I was a soldier again, every nerve alive with danger. Gloria startled awake upstairs while Naomi screamed from her bedroom.

Three men entered the house armed.

Masks. Pistols. Nervous movements.

Young.

Too young.

One shouted for money while another ransacked drawers. The third climbed the stairs toward my family.

That was his mistake.

War returned to me completely after that.

Not the fear.

The training.

I moved before thinking. Grabbed the revolver hidden beneath the side table and fired twice. The first intruder collapsed instantly. The second panicked and shot wildly while I rushed him. We crashed into furniture hard enough to splinter wood apart. I felt his gun burning against my ribs before it discharged. Then my revolver thundered again.

Blood sprayed across family pictures hanging on the wall.

The third man fled immediately afterward.

Coward ran straight through the broken doorway into rain and darkness.

Then the pain finally hit me.

My stomach burned hot and wet. I looked down and saw blood pouring between trembling fingers pressed against the wound. Gloria and Naomi rushed downstairs crying hysterically while trying to keep me awake.

But I already knew.

I’d seen enough death to recognize it.

Funny thing was, I wasn’t scared anymore.

As Gloria held me, memories drifted quietly through my mind. Momma ironing clothes before dawn. Chicago summers. Vietnam rainstorms. Church choirs. Naomi learning to walk. Gloria laughing beneath sunlight.

A good life.

Despite everything, I’d truly lived one.

“I’m sorry,” Naomi sobbed.

I touched her face weakly. “Don’t be.”

Then darkness took me.

…

At first, death felt peaceful.

No pain.

No fear.

Just endless silence stretching infinitely in all directions.

Then a voice called my name.

“Wendell.”

The sound didn’t travel through ears. It echoed directly through existence itself. Ancient. Vast. Impossible to disobey.

“Wendell.”

Darkness shifted around me.

Fragments of memory drifted past like shattered mirrors. My childhood. The war. Gloria. Naomi. Blood. Prayer. Death itself.

“You have suffered,” the voice declared calmly. “You have endured despair, violence, loss, guilt, and grief. Yet even broken, you sought meaning.”

“Who are you?” I asked, though speaking felt strange here.

“A guide.”

The darkness rippled.

“I offer purpose. Accept my hand, complete what must be done, and you shall receive your reward.”

Something about the voice disturbed me deeply. Not its tone. Its familiarity.

Like I had heard it long ago.

Like it belonged to me somehow.

Then the memories began unraveling completely.

Not Wendell’s memories.

Older memories.

Vaster memories.

Cities burning beneath black skies. Endless worlds collapsing into silence. Countless souls kneeling before a throne of ash and eternity. Power vast enough to extinguish civilizations with thought alone.

And then, I remembered.

Wendell had never truly been human.

He had been sealed away.

Buried beneath mortality so deeply that even he forgot himself.

Forgot his authority.

Forgot his name.

I opened my eyes slowly.

Not Wendell’s eyes.

My eyes.

The Supreme Death.

At the same time, there was also Da Wei.

…

..

.

[POV: Da Wei]

The false afterlife shattered around me instantly.

Darkness peeled apart beneath my awakening presence while cosmic pressure flooded outward infinitely. The mysterious voice recoiled violently, its confidence collapsing into terror as my memories fully returned.

Ah.

So this was how they did it.

They preyed upon the broken, the grieving, and the vulnerable. They plucked suffering souls from dying worlds, offered purpose disguised as salvation, then used them as pawns within these endless games. I’ve already seen it once in Ru Qiu, but only now I realized how bad it truly was.

Rage stirred quietly inside me.

I stood within the collapsing void while Wendell’s life continued replaying through my thoughts. Momma’s kindness. Gloria’s love. Naomi’s tears. Every ounce of suffering humanity endured simply trying to survive cruel worlds that consumed good people without mercy.

I didn’t like it.

Because Wendell had been real.

I had lived that life completely, through his memories. I felt every heartbreak personally. And now, I realized something that unsettled even me.

Humanity was fragile beyond belief.

Yet despite that fragility, they still loved, hoped, and endured.

The entity hiding within the darkness finally spoke again, trembling now as if it could percieve me. “You shouldn’t be here…”

“No, I am where I need to be,” I interrupted softly.

The void froze.

I looked toward the presence slowly, and for the first time in countless hundreds of years, genuine killing intent entered my voice.

“You take grieving souls at their weakest moments and chain them into suffering for a goal that you won’t even explain, promising them a vague reward that holds no real value. You disgust me. People fight for a just cause, and you just gave me one. I will destroy you, if it’s the last thing I do. I can see you, Conquest. No, I can see you, the existence who made Conquest.”

I pulled and the darkness vanished, revealing a mysterious existence.

“It’s too early for the two of us to meet, but I guess, it’s fine. Nice to meet you, Da Wei. I am the Game Master. Or in this case, I guess you can call me Project Seven.”